B2B startups — B2C has some great tips for you.

Insights from marketers from Assembled, Grammarly, Atlassian, and DocuSign who have done both B2B and B2C.

Hello, I’m Hema, and welcome to my newsletter, First Impression. Each month, I write an in-depth post on positioning, brand, or GTM strategy for early-stage startups. Join startup founders, investors, and practitioners and subscribe to get the newsletter in your inbox.

The distinction between B2B and B2C marketing is shrinking, and we use phrases like “consumerization of B2B” or “prosumer marketing” as a shorthand to describe B2B brands adopting B2C principles and techniques. Increasingly, end users have the power to buy or influence the products and services an organization buys.

For this post, I spoke to two brilliant marketers I’ve had the pleasure to know and work with — Megha Narayan (head of marketing, Assembled, ex-Atlassian, ex-Visa) and Jeremy Post (Growth analytics consultant, ex-head of growth, Grammarly, ex-Docusign). Like me, they have done both B2C and B2B marketing and were generous in sharing their thoughts, observations, and advice.

Customer-first, not product-first

Take any B2C business — customers and their experience — are at the center of their business. B2C startups start with the customer need and work backward, while B2B frequently starts with the technology or product and moves outwards towards the customer. In doing so, B2B startups can be imprecise about defining customer pain or gloss over it in favor of the cool things their technology can do. Here’s Megha:

“In both B2B and B2C, the marketing primitives are the same: Stories, Data, and Customer experience. Accessing first-hand customer insights is easier in B2C than in B2B. Often, in B2B, you have to fight to get closer to the customer. But you can’t tell good stories if you are not close to the buyer, their pain, and their challenges.”

Here’s Jeremy’s experience when he joined DocuSign:

“I was used to marketing to people, and now I have to market to the business — this nameless, faceless entity. But inside these organizations, it’s people making the decisions. In B2B it’s harder to understand what the customer cares about. Therefore, it’s crucial you get a seat at the table. Shadow sales calls. Stay close to those doing research, UX, pricing, packaging. Let them know you want to partner with them. Tell them you this need information to do your job well.”

Pain mitigation strategy over customer education

Anytime a new product or technology is introduced, it’ll be met with some resistance, even if the pain is evident to the customer. B2C startups actively counter this with pain mitigation strategies. It’s built into the overall customer experience and business model. However, B2B often resorts to this lofty idea of customer education. This causes two problems:

• Subconsciously embracing the idea, even if we don’t say it, that the customer is too dumb to figure this out, and we need to educate them.

• This, in turn, leads to marketing executing against this idea with an overload of information — explainer video, fact sheets, FAQs, and documentation.

The problem with this approach is that it puts the onus on the customer to learn and educate themselves instead of putting the onus on you, the startup, to make it easier for your customer to work with you!

Let’s look at a few examples of B2C startups and how they address pain mitigation as part of their core business model and customer experience:

Thinking proactively and skeptically about why a customer might resist adopting a product helps us think creatively to mitigate that risk.

Revenue, not PQLs or MQLs

I started my career in consumer marketing. At AOL, Snapfish, and ModCloth, I was responsible for hard numbers - i.e., revenue, profitability, and ROI. When I first started working in the B2B world, I was surprised at how low the accountability bar was for marketers. It was all about MQLs and SQLs. Here’s Jeremy’s observation:

“Sales cycles are short in B2C, close is fast and easy. Attribution is clearer. B2B sales is complicated. We need to understand the monetary value of what we are driving in mid-funnel. Not all MQLs or PQLs are equal. Segmenting mid-funnel by source, vertical, industry, and other attributes and calculating their propensity to convert into a deal is crucial to understanding the impact of marketing spend.”

I believe that marketers must be responsible for revenue. They have to understand how directly and indirectly marketing contributed to a deal closing. That level of attribution, common in e-commerce and B2C in general, is not as developed or as sophisticated as it can be in B2B. It’s not because the data or the tools are not there. Here’s Jeremy again:

“We have the data. Both firmographic as well as for individuals. B2B marketing doesn’t use as much consumer and individual data as we could. Data-driven profile building, common in B2C, using CDP and 3rd party data, is something B2B marketers can lean into more. Often Privacy is cited as the problem, but if you do it right, you can do it in a way that individual privacy is not compromised.”

Community from day one

B2C startups think community from the get-go. This community creation is organic in B2C, and it’s magic when it works well. Everyone wants organic growth and a direct relationship with the customer at scale. But barring a few B2B companies that have thoughtfully built communities like Figma, GitHub, and Notion, most B2B startups fail to get this off the ground. Here’s Megha’s observation:

“The root of B2C’s success with community building has to do with that direct customer relationship. Often, in B2B startups, the culture is to build a fortress around the customer and not let anyone other than sales get close to them. Customer interaction is highly managed, which is the opposite of organic community building.”

Much of the time, B2B startups jump into community creation without asking if it makes sense for their product and growth strategy. Here’s Megha:

“There is a bit of FOMO around this. Let’s do what Miro or Notion are doing. Then it becomes about copying the tactics, and it rarely works. Instead they’d be better off asking the question, “What’s the best way to bring my story to life? What’s the best way to provide value to my customer? It may not be community.”

Brand and storytelling are oxygen

I’m a big believer in the power of brand in influencing buying decisions, and I wrote about this in B2B startups need to build a brand now more than ever. Although B2B marketers talk about the “consumerization of B2B” and understand that at the end of the day, it’s individuals making buying decisions, there is simply not enough conviction in the leaders to invest in a brand unless the founder is a designer or a marketer.

Here’s Megha:

“When I started at Atlassian, brand equaled top-of-funnel advertising. The scope was small. But in Apple and Visa, it was the oxygen we breathed. Everyone sourced from it. It very much comes from the founders. Storytelling is at the heart of B2C marketing. In many B2B startups Brand is owned by designers. You’ll never see that in B2C companies.

Brand ownership should be dispersed. Maybe there is a center of excellence, a team that maintains and stewards it, but if one team is going to “own” brand, it will forever be in a silo.”

I’m in violent agreement with her. Even Jeremy, who is a growth and performance marketer, agrees with the importance of brand building:

“In B2B, brand tends to be relegated to “oh, we’ll figure this out later,” but then it becomes too late. When buying a B2B product, a number of people are involved in the decision, and they all have some influence. No one person can just buy the product like you can in B2C. In a way, it’s even more important to build a brand in B2B.”

He told me about his experience at DocuSign launching a new Contract Lifecycle Management product.

“The space already had heavy weights like Conga and Ironclad that were dominating it. Our sales team could not even get their foot in the door. In situations like this, thinking about broader positioning and brand building is the only way to get a seat at the table.”

Customer marketing, not product marketing

You’ll notice that most B2C businesses don’t have an extensive product marketing function. It’s not like they don’t sell products. They do. But their ethos is rooted in customer marketing and not product marketing.

B2C companies see the customer more holistically than B2B. They think of customer lifecycle marketing, not product marketing. They think relevance and personalization, not value proposition and feature updates. Here’s Megha’s perspective:

“B2C marketers are Lifecycle marketers. Personalization is so nascent in B2B, and companies trying to apply it do it in a slow, manual, fragmented way. B2C is years ahead, and we are trying to catch up. In B2B, product marketers spend way too much time on utility-oriented tasks like launches and enabling sales with cheatsheets and one-pagers. The core job, however, is the same in both: How am I benefiting this customer? How can I be meaningful and relevant to them?”

B2C also approaches personas very differently than B2B marketing. Personas are flatted in B2B in a way that is infuriating to a sophisticated marketer. The common refrain is that Sales cannot process complex personas; therefore, they need to be simplified. How often have we all heard, “Give me a simple persona I can sell to!”

Well, sales folks, people are not simple. This includes you. Ask yourself this question: Are your buying decisions simple? Are they made instantly without complex consideration? Are you not influenced by a number of tiny little factors — perceptions, biases, emotions, and feelings — some of which you may not even be aware of? If it’s all true for you, it’s true for your prospects.

Here’s Jeremy’s observation:

“It’s not just a lead I can sell to. It’s not linear. It’s a matrix. A matrix of different attributes along a number of different axes, and when you mix them together, you get twenty different personas. We have to break apart the idea of a persona and understand the underlying attributes and behavior that define them. We have the data to do this sort of comprehensive definition. B2B tends not to use them.”

These mindsets can be easily applied to B2B. Sales, product, and marketing will be better off for it. However, it requires changing how leaders think about building and selling their products.

It was so much fun talking to Megha and Jeremy for this newsletter! Thank you both from the bottom of my heart for sharing your insights with the readers of First Impression 💖 🙏🏾.